I didn't receive my paycheck this week.
Um, you're going to have to talk to payroll about that.
I did. And they said, 'Mel, we're going to need to go ahead and move you downstairs.' So, if you could just go ahead and pack up your stuff and move it down there, that would be terrific.
Excuse me. I believe you have my stapler.
Live from Joe's mom's basement, it's the Stacking Benjamins Show. I'm Joe's Mom's Neighbor, Doug, and think it might actually be time to dust off the old resume. Let's see what we got here. Huh? Oh. Oh, wait. Check that cuz actually on today's show helping us lose the resume and score a job. We welcome Gary Burnison. Also in headlines who gets scammed the most by con artists on your phone here with the answer from First Orion. We welcome Jonathan Sassy. Ah, don't worry. We're still going to save time to throw out the Haven lifeline to help a lucky listener with a money issue. Answer a letter from the mailbag. And we're going to top it all off with my incredible trivia. Don't you worry about that. We're never going to miss that. Now, two guys who are working hard for a living. Wait a minute. Working hard for a living. I think that should be hardly working for a living. Joe, aren't we supposed to be truthful on this show? Oh, just read it. Oh, yeah, sure. Okay. Two guys who are working hard for a living. Wink wink. Here they are. Joe and OG.
Hardly working. What's that about?
That's a funny one. Working hard or hardly working?
Does that one get the golf clap? Hey everybody, welcome to Party Wednesday here in the basement. I'm Joe Salcihi, Average Joe Money on Twitter and the second half of this year party. Not really second half, the other half of this year party. I'm going to get in trouble again. People are going to say I'm being mean to you and I'm not trying to be. I just don't know how to talk. The one and only OG, right? How's it going, man? Let's do Wednesday, huh?
Fantastic. You think it's still spring break for some people? I think so. Right.
Spring break for us every day because we love it down here. Gary Burnison coming down to the basement. How awesome is that? We're going to talk whether you are looking for a job or you already have a job you're happy with. It's always a good time. OG, it's always a good time to be thinking about your next opportunity.
I've been meaning to talk to you about a little something. Uh there's this uh I'm going to I'm going to need a raise or I'm going to have to walk 30%.
30% raise. 30 30% more money.
Yes. Yes. 30% times. Wait, we're still at zero. Hey, guess what? This episode of Stacking Benjamins brought to you by Blue Apron. Let's get off that quick. Uh, Blue Apron is treating Stacking Benjamin's listeners to $30 off your first order if you visit blueapron.com/sb. So check out this week's menu and get your $30 off with free shipping at blueapron.com/sb. And we're also brought to you by magnifymoney.com. When you go to Magnify Money, you know what you find out, OG? All those products you've been using for checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, whatever they might be, you probably don't have the right one. And you know why? The average person who goes to Magnify Money saves $450 by heading to Magnify Money. Use our link so that as mom says, you can say we sent you head to stackingbenjamins.com/magnifymoney. We've already saved people money. Now we're going to save their career. What? The bar is low for Wednesday here.
I was going to say, why don't you uh why don't you promise a little more so we can underdeliver.
The bar is low. Let's get this party started.
Hello, darlings. And now it's time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines.
Our first headline comes to us from USA Today. This spring, clear mediocre credit cards out of your wallet and give your credit rating a boost. This is, you know, they talk about spring cleaning. I never thought until I read this about spring cleaning your wallet and what...
I just did this. Like literally, I just did this. Go ahead. I want to hear this.
Well, I did it because of this piece. Listen to this. This written by Gregory Karp. Spring is a great time to declutter a closet full of clothes, a garage full of boxes, and your wallet full of inferior credit cards. The average credit card holder with decent credit has more than four open accounts. And Americans opened 110 million new credit card accounts in 2016 alone. According to the latest Consumer Financial Protection Bureau study, with all that plastic in consumer wallets, not all cards are worthy. At least one in five credit card customers is carrying the wrong card, usually because fees or rewards are misaligned with their purchasing habits, according to the JD Power 2016 US credit card satisfaction study. So, I've got this one card in my wallet that has no rewards, doesn't have an annual fee. It's one of my first credit cards. So, it's credit I've had open for a long time. But I realize that I have enough credit. I'm an old enough guy.
You're an old enough man that's had a long enough credit history. You don't need 47 years of credit history. 43 will do.
Right. Right. So, I have cut the cord on this particular card and it was great.
I found out that and I guess I knew this, but I did the exact same thing that this article is talking about here over the years, right? You get a bonus points for opening this or you get a free cash thing for that or something. And so, I had this smattering of cards from different providers. I guess I knew you could do it, but it wasn't until I read something else about it. You can contact these credit providers and have them consolidate your lines of credit onto...
Whichever one's best for you.
Whichever one you want to do, right? In my case, I had two Capital One cards.
One was a Capital One Venture card and then one was some other one that I had.
And like literally, you just go online.
Uh no, I didn't have that one. But you literally just go online and go transfer to this and it goes and it says, 'Oh, you're saving this in fees and this interest rate is going to be better because you know you've got what?' Anyway, it really helps. Plus, from a credit standpoint, if you're worried about that, from like a credit scoring standpoint, you look better if you have higher lines of credit. It sounds really stupid, but it's true. Like, if all of your cards are $10,000 limits...
The next one that you get, they're going to look and say, 'Well, you know, this guy's got 10,000. He needs another 10, you know.'
Yeah. I have heard many people tell me that, hey, my credit card company told me they were giving me new credit and I called them back and said, don't you dare do that. And I said, but why? If now let's be clear here, behavior, right? Let's we probably got to back up for a second and say if your behavior is you're not paying your credit card off every month, then certainly do that first. But once you get to that point and if you can't do it by yourself, the cool thing is there are electronic means to help you like Debitize that can help you take care of that and pay it off like it's a debit card. So if you're not sure what I think it's debitize.com, let me look at it here and it is...
Of course, the most important thing is not paying interest. A lot of people get hung up on, you know, don't have any credit card fees and that sort of thing. You got to weigh those, right? If you use a ton of benefits from a certain provider, you know, the fee that you pay may be worth it. But again, you can go through and look at all those things. Secondly, you can contact the providers and tell them that you're thinking about cancelling because of the high fee and likely they'll give you a year free. So, you know, even if you want to keep it, you can still get rid of a fee or two or lower an interest rate or something like that.
Gregory in this piece says to do three things. Gather your cards and ask these three questions. Number one, does it charge an annual fee? Number two, do I carry a balance? And number three, is it a rewards card? And to your point, if it's a rewards card, do the rewards make sense...
Or to what you spend it on, right? I mean, like if you have an airline credit card and you never fly, you know, you could have a million miles, but what's that good for?
Right? And then once you've examined all your cards, use what he calls the CARDS acronym, which says you do one of these five things. Cancel the card, acquire a new one, renegotiate terms on your old card, decommission the card by not using it anymore, or save it, and make sure you're optimizing it. If you're going to carry it, optimize it. And that doesn't mean to run up the balance, right? Because credit utilization.
I've been really good at optimizing before.
You want to have, to your point earlier, you want to have a lot of open credit and be using very little of it, and that'll spike your credit score. That's people want to know that you are...
Yeah, you're responsible. You've got access to all this money, but you're living within your means.
We'll link to this piece on our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com. And in our second headline, a new study's out from First Orion that says that one group has experienced financial losses three times as often as another group due to phone scams in 2018. And here walking down the basement right now from the people that commissioned the study, Jonathan Sassy. How are you, man?
Well, I'm so glad you're here because this is surprising. Obviously, this time of year is a big time for phone scams, but you found that one group is getting scammed more often than another.
Yeah, it's interesting. Definitely a time of the year where we survey, find out what's going on with people on phone scams. That's our job at First Orion really is to provide some transparency in the call process and help protect people. So, it helps us to know what's going on. And we reach out and we survey about a thousand mobile consumers. And what we found is a trend that seems to be continuing is that millennials seem to be the generation that's getting hit the hardest on phone scams.
Which is amazing because as you know, Jonathan, and I bet you were surprised, too, because it seems like, you know, we always report on older people getting scammed. I think the idea is that older people get scammed the most and they may even be one of the bigger targets for scams, but when it comes to phone scams, what we're seeing is that the millennials are actually getting hit harder and are more likely to give information that could compromise their identity.
Why do you think that is? Were you able to survey why? You know, we've poked at this quite a bit and one of the things that I think seems to be coming through is that older generations tend to be a little bit more skeptical. They're a little less likely to want to give people information over the phone about themselves, about maybe their personal finances or as it relates to internet security. And one of the things that we see, you know, from some of the millennial respondents is that there's this thinking that there's a safety net out there, right? My credit card company will protect me. My information is already out there. There's not much anybody can really do with this. And there's this thought that, you know, I've already kind of given into the fact that my information is my digital currency these days. And they're a little bit more free with that information. Where we see with some of the older consumers are still kind of skeptical about putting information into services online. Trusting somebody to access that information and still trying to kind of keep that secure.
I felt very proud a couple days ago when I found out I was going to be talking to you, Jonathan, because I'd never had an IRS phone scam and I got one and it was so cool.
Well, yeah, it's, you know, one of the things that came out of the survey that's also quite interesting is nearly a third of all people have received some kind of IRS scam attempt, either through the phone, email, text, what have you. You know, the IRS doesn't tend to reach out to people and tell them it's time to pay up. They go through that in different ways. It's an increasingly strong tactic, especially this time of year, to get some kind of a weird phone call from somebody who says they're from the IRS and it's you missed your tax filings by a certain amount, it's time to pay up. Is that the clue? They're asking you to pay on the phone.
Yeah, that's a big red flag. Anytime somebody calls you up and immediately tries to get to the fact that you owe some money and it's time to pay, that's something that you should really get all the protections up around you because that's not a normal practice from virtually anybody is to jump right into give me some money.
And then the other thing I was going to ask because you know it's funny is I've worked in this industry for a long time. I hung up the phone and I thought maybe there was somebody I should have called. Maybe some way that I should report it. Is there some place to report it when I do get a phone scam or do you just hang up and let it go?
Well, hanging up is always a good idea. So, you want to get off that phone as fast as you can? Yeah, there's ways to report it. You know, at First Orion, we have applications for people's smartphones under the brand Privacy Star, which for iPhone and Android can help a lot. Um, it helps block and identify those callers and it gives you a way to report them. There's also some ways to do that through your carrier depending on which mobile carrier you might use. We actually power a lot of the solutions for T-Mobile. So, there's things that show up on your phone that say scam likely that help you avoid those types of phone calls. But yeah, that's really one of the big ones is grab Privacy Star for your phone. You know, check with your carrier, find out what solutions are there. There's a lot of free options for identifying and reporting these types of calls and it's important to do so because it helps protect the next person.
I was going to ask that about Privacy Star and you said that's on both Android and iOS.
It is. Yep. So whether you have Android or iPhone, there's a Privacy Star app for you and it helps a lot and both of them give you a way to report these kind of calls and provide as much information as you can. And we have a lot of technology that goes into identifying these calls, but every little bit helps. And when you say, 'Hey, I just got an IRS scam call from this phone number.' It might help the next person avoid that same phone call.
And two quick questions about Privacy Star, Jonathan, is number one, when I get a phone call, does it just automatically take a look at the calls that come in? How does it work?
It does. So generally we just ignore your contacts because you know who your contacts are better than we do. So we don't really try and screen those types of calls. But if it's an unknown phone number, we're going to try and add as much information as we can so that you know when you have those few seconds to make a decision on whether you're going to answer the phone or not. Knowing who it is and sometimes even more importantly why they're calling is really important before you hit the answer button. Um, so we're going to try and give you information on maybe it's a scammer, maybe it's a telemarketer, you know, maybe it's your children's school calling to let you know that there's a closure today. But either way, trying to give you enough information so you can answer the phone with confidence or send it to voicemail or block it.
And then the last question that I'm sure people are screaming at their device is, uh, how much does it cost?
Um, the app's free. And again, I mentioned is if you have T-Mobile, we've put together a great program with them so that, you know, everybody who has T-Mobile actually gets an alert that says scam likely if you get a phone call from a bad guy. If you have Privacy Star, there's free versions of the app that provide a great layer of protection. There's some paid features if you want some extra bells and whistles, but you certainly don't have to and it does help protect you.
Awesome. And it's called Privacy Star. We'll have a link to this and to the study on our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com. Hey Jonathan, thanks for hanging out with us for a few minutes. I really appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks so much for the time, Joe.
So, how about that, OG? Millennials. Millennials.
Yep. Come out of the woodwork. Say I'd never... I'm the one that's above average. I'll never...
But I think there's some good points there that, you know, no matter what age group you are, it doesn't matter. We can all get scammed. But this voice of authority that scammers use can really be the problem. That can be a huge...
You said the other day, uh, I don't know, a week or two ago on Twitter that you finally got your IRS robocall.
Oh, that was so great. Was it awesome? It was so great. It was... I answered the phone. I don't recognize the phone number, but it was in Oregon and we had just come through Oregon. I'm like, 'Oh, Portland, Oregon.' So, I answer the phone.
We know people there. Sure.
Yeah. So, I answer the phone and it was a robot call. This is the do not hang up. This is the Internal Revenue Service. This is your last opportunity to pay your... Yes, I finally got one. It was fantastic.
Did you keep them on the hook? Was it like cranky anchors? You know, I should have... I was in the middle of 50 things. What I should have done was hooked up the recording equipment and made hay on that thing. And if I get another one, I'm totally going to do that. But...
Did not... was not able to do that. I had to hang up. I was in the middle of something else. So...
Yeah, you could totally do the 'Oh my gosh. Really? Hold on. Let me get to a private area where I can chat with you.' Put it on mute and like hook all your stuff up and then 'Okay. What's going on?' I told you about the time that I did that with the sales guy. I feel so terrible about that now. Telemarketer. He was selling AT&T long distance.
We'll talk about this later.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh maybe good stuff there. Maybe horrible stuff if you're an AT&T phone salesperson who has to deal with OG. I think our lessons are number one to the earlier point, doesn't matter what age group you are, watch out for the scammers. And then number two is extra credit cards in your wallet. Remember to spring clean that, too.
Gary Burnison about to come down to the basement. Of course, Gary wrote a book that I really like back in 2011 called No Fear of Failure: Real Stories of How Leaders Deal with Risk and Change. He is the CEO of a company that works all the time in the stuff we're going to talk about today, finding people a new job. He's a chief executive officer at Korn Ferry International. Of course, they're a worldwide leader in executive recruitment, a premier provider of talent management solutions. He spends his days, OG. He and his team helping people look much better for a potential employer. And whether you're looking for a job and you might be thinking right now, this isn't for me. I'm going to skip ahead. You never know. You never know when that next opportunity is going to come along. Or...
Boy, you're staring me right in the eyes when you're telling me that.
You never know when it's going to be time to move on.
Can I talk to you in the hall after we talk to Gary and you might want to bring a box with you? Grab your box. Let's say hello to Gary Burnison coming down to the basement.
And joining me on my dad shortwave, Gary Burnison. Gary, how are you, man?
Hey, fabulous. How are you doing?
Well, good. I would love it if you and I could talk about skunks because I think in the intro to your book when you talk about the skunk story that kind of makes the point that resonates throughout the rest of the book.
Okay. So listen, I'm not in your basement. Uh you know, imagine Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, California. Early in the morning, driving to work, sunny, sun glistening off the ocean, traffic comes to a halt. I look and there's a guy in the middle of the street. He got out of his truck and what do I see? I see a skunk with a McDonald's soda cup stuck to his snout and he was shaking it trying to get rid of it. And what was more boggling than that was this guy. And you could see he was like, 'Okay, should I be like the hero of the helpless or the victim of the clueless?' And it was the most amazing thing. And you know, I think we all feel that way about our boss or about our jobs or about our careers. And that's why I wrote the book.
Yeah. It's funny partly like we're the skunk too with our heads stuck in there because there's the sweet stuff and now we're stuck in a spot we don't want to be. You know, I feel that most people kind of wait to be plucked out of the ocean or what they do is they'll just send a resume to companies blindly. So, you know, you're not happy what you're doing. You keep hitting the snooze button. You know, you treat it like it's a pet. You keep tapping and tapping and tapping. You know, you can't wait for jury duty because you hate your job so much. But what people do is they just start blindly sending out resumes and that doesn't work.
Well, let's talk about before we even get to the resume and that not working. Back to what you're talking about like bad bosses. You talk about this in the book that it's not necessarily a reason to quit if you have a bad boss. Why is that?
You can learn from bad bosses. Believe it or not, it teaches you what not to do. It's kind of like as a parent, right? You remember your dad or your mom or you know it kind of okay well that's I'm not going to do that I'm not going to be that way. People do leave bosses, they don't leave companies. And so I would just encourage before you jump ship really be reflective about that.
So maybe see if you can go to a different department after you learn from them, Gary. I mean...
Absolutely. I think most people just think the grass is greener and they are miserable and they don't do anything or you know and I think it's actually better to look at opportunities assuming you like what you're doing in the company, look for opportunities within the existing walls of where you are.
But let's say that you're going to make the move. Well whether you make the move internally or externally, you talk about passion a lot. You talk about finding this job that really resonates with you and that you authentically just love. Yet I know people, Gary, when I read that I go, 'Well, I know people that just love music, but unless you're one of the top people in music, it doesn't really pay.' How do you take those two things? I need a paycheck, but at the same time, I want to do what I love.
Look, clearly, you know, money is important. Okay? So, I don't want to minimize that. And we all have to have a job and we have to buy bread and milk. I don't want to minimize that at all. But I do want to emphasize the fact that if you're happy, you're going to be motivated. And if you're motivated, you're going to outperform. And so there's a real linkage between purpose and performance. To your point, you're right. If you love music or you like model railroads, I guess what I would say is, okay, so you love music. What does that say about you? So are you doing some... So does that mean you're creative versus somebody who's analytical. And so take that train of thought and start to explore what that really means and can you find something that maybe is more creative and is closer to music than just being Beyonce, right? Because we're not all going to be right. So that's my point is that the first step should actually be what does get you excited and what is that purpose? And it could be music. And so I'm saying, okay, well, don't take it literally, but what are those things? And then take assessments, which we've got, and kind of do some self-exploration around strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, purpose.
Well, and at the beginning of the book, you go through being very critical on yourself and that you don't look at yourself the same way that other people do. But even gets worse than that. You say, Gary, that the way people go about searching for a new job is just completely wrong.
Completely wrong. I mean, what I've seen from college grads to Fortune 100 board members that they are clueless like that skunk in Malibu, California, and almost all the time the first thing they do is just, you know, they go to update that resume and they blindly set it out. I mean, people think it's 90% of the job effort when it's only 10%. And so you have to have it. I'm not saying you don't have to have it, but you can't just automatically go to that because if you do that, you've got as much chance. You just won't go down to 7-Eleven and buy a lottery ticket.
Well, and that's what it seems like when you go to these job boards now and you put in a few keywords. To your point, you actually said this in the book. You put in a few keywords that you hope a search engine's going to pick up and then from there you just cross your fingers and pray, which doesn't seem like much of a strategy.
You know, I was raised in a real small town in Kansas and I can remember and I'm sure you did the same thing. How did you get your first job? So, what happened was you went down to the grocery store, you went down to the ice cream shop, you went to the bike shop, whatever it was, but what happened? A friend probably said something like, 'Hey, that's a great place to work. You should go check it out.' So, what happens? You go down and you target where you want to work and you fill out an application. Why is it that 10, 20, 40, 50 years later, we forget that. We forget to be proactive targeting the industries or sectors or cities or companies that we'd want to work at.
